In this, his first collection of stories since his celebrated, award-winning Last Days of the Dog-Men, Brad Watson takes useven deeper into the riotous, appalling, and mournful oddity of humanbeings.In prose so perfectly pitched as to suggest somecelestial harmony, he writes about every kind of domestic discord: unruly or distant children, alienated spouses, domestic abuse, loneliness, death, divorce. In his masterful title novella, a freshlymarried teenaged couple are visited by an unusual pair of inmates from anearby insane asylum--and find out exactly how mismatched they reallyare.With exquisite tenderness, Watson relates the brutalityof both nature and human nature. There's no question about it. BradWatson writes so well--with such an all-seeing, six-dimensional view ofhuman hopes, inadequacies, and rare grace--that he must be anextraterrestrial.